Working on Thanksgiving

Family separation is one of the most difficult aspects of military life, and during the holidays this is especially true.  After spending several decades being part of a military family, I speak from personal experience. 

Being together is important at Thanksgiving, it's important at Passover, it's important on St. Patrick's Day and it's important on birthdays.  Spending holidays in the same room is never a given for soldiers and their families, so you celebrate together as hard as you can, whenever you can.  Can you imagine what it would have been like to have had my dad home for Thanksgiving - JOY!- only to spend the meal staring at empty chairs because my mom and older brother were out doing their time working for $9 an hour?  I can because I've been there-  and it sucks.  I realize that when soldiers marry police officers, firefighters, medical professionals and other essential jobs that keep us safe and don't have holidays built in, families have an additional burden of separation.  It's understandable.  But empty chairs and uneaten meals are hardly justified by a day of sales at the strip mall...aka Black Friday.*  

"there are many like it, but this one is mine."  photo credit:  adam peck via ThinkProgress

This week I've gotten myself into a tremendous lather over the War on Thanksgiving- along with pretty much everyone else.  What is UP with Big Retail trying to cancel Thanksgiving for their workers?! 

As many military spouses work in retail, along with the highly visible Big Box efforts to recruit veterans and milspouses, I would argue that this may have a disproportionate impact on military families.  On a practical level, during deployment, many families function as de-facto single parent households, and military families are less likely to have relatives close by- which means that if mom is deployed and dad has to work at KMart, the kids don't simply celebrate with grandparents- the holiday just doesn't happen.  On the sentimental level (it is a holiday, after all) our time together is so limited. For many families, Thanksgiving is the only holiday they will spend together this year.  I could also argue that Thanksgiving's status as a uniquely American holiday contributes to its significance in military households.  In light of those factors, Big Retail's actions seem especially wrong.  Consider the financial stressors that many military families are facing- and the career limitations available for spouses, it is highly likely that thousands, if not millions, of military households will be directly affected by these greedy self-serving shenanigans.

Of course, there are counter arguments to be made about how cash-strapped military families depend on Black Friday sales for makin' spirits bright (lalala!), and that employees need the "extra" money they can earn with one more shift to work.  To the former, I'd question whether one could really "depend" on getting a flat-screen tv for $25 or whatever, and I'd also point out that retail has a knack for cutting hours elsewhere to avoid paying employees overtime.  Please tell me you've heard that before!

What do you guys think?  Are we accustomed to separation or off-calendar celebrations and thus take this in stride?  Or are we super-double irate and ready to boycott?

* Black Friday is so-called because retailers run in the financial red (at a deficit) for the whole year and then get back in the financial black (making their yearly profit margin) thanks to the bump in purchases that marks the beginning of the open Christmas season shopping.

*ECHO*

Letter for a TDY

To my Fiance ~

Last night you left.

This morning the house is quiet, things are neater than usual but it feels like an ordinary day. Maybe you're at an early morning Physical Training (PT) session and I'm going about my normal routine- brushing teeth, picking out my work clothes, making tea, grabbing the yogurt smoothie for breakfast at the office. It's a busy day. I bounce from early meeting, to lunch meeting...I am ON! I coordinate with my co-workers and our volunteer at the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) pick-up site, I get in the zone and am sooo close to knocking out the full e-newsletter today...then I mess up my schedule and end up driving to base for a Family Readiness Group (FRG) meeting that is actually tomorrow. I turn around and head back to work at a cute local cafe with a fresh-made lemonade for the last couple hours of work. The campaign season is in full swing for local elections and I have a volunteer meeting after my 5pm networking meet-up, and phone-banking for a kick-ass progressive female candidate after that. 

All this is my regular, my normal, but I'm doing it today because by 8:30pm when I finally make the three trips from the car to the house with my laptop and workout clothes and library books, and grab some HoneyNut Cheerios and a well-deserved Jameson & Juice for dinner it will really hit me that you're not coming home tonight. 

I miss you. 

As much as we've been fighting and as much as we've been stressed over wedding business and work business...a Tour of Duty (TDY) is not a lot of fun. 

Does it have it's benefits? Sure. By the end of weeks of daily Skyping and abstinence, we're going to have crazy I-missed-you-and-now-you're-here!-get-naked sex. I will marvel again at how awesome we are at web-based communication. We're supposed to work our way through a pre-marriage counseling workbook and this will most likely happen...along with making fun of the pre-marriage counseling chapter headings and some deep, soul-searching conversations. I'm going to have a list of dinners that I'm sure you've missed and will cook for you as soon as you're back all worked out in my head. A couple weeks in the future, this house will be CLEANSED. My to-do list will be shorter. And I may have your favorite root beer (the ones I've been hiding from you in the bathroom sink cupboard where you never look) in the fridge, waiting to surprise you. Or maybe I'll save that root beer for the next time I need to say "sorry". 

Tonight I'm ok. It takes me a couple days to get used to sleeping without you but I have a plan. It involves a weekend whitewater rafting trip, and enjoying nature with women-folk. I'll be splitting a bed with someone else. Now, don't get jealous- we're just friends. Next week is what I'm dreading. When it will hit me like a ton of bricks that I've been abandoned. Again. Do other significant others feel this way? The spouses of pilots, perhaps? Or presidents? Or start-up entrepreneurs?

I have my own life. WE have our own lives, we spouses of traveling soldiers. And yet separation is one facet of our lives that we become reacquainted with again and again. This time it isn't Afghanistan, or Syria. But learning to live with the fact that it could be is difficult. Almost as difficult as being without you. 

love,

B. 

*Historic Postcards photo credit:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ourfamilylegends/tolilly_fromson_ben%20001.jpg

Philia

Say you're somebody. Somebody with roots. Somebody with flair. Somebody who needs people to know her personally the way a back-alley hooker needs crack cocaine. 

I've traveled a fair bit and lived abroad. Never have I ever felt comfortable in any place I've lived until I have located three major things- "my" coffee shop (preferably with that barrista who knows me by name and whose life aspirations we discuss at length), good Asian restaurants, and a girlfriend. Think about your grandmother saying the word. This ain't your "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" girlfriend...I'm talking about a grrrlfriend. A soul-sister. 

My four best friends live in different cities, respectively: 1,172 miles, 548 miles, 698 miles- oh, and one lives in a different country...so 3,000 miles away from me. It's hard. Being in a solid relationship with tickle fights, back-rubs, and regular hot, steamy eye-contact is fantastic. And I'd rather be sleeping here next to him than in 3/4 locations alluded to above. But as a woman, I can't live on eros alone. 

Enter the friend-crush. And this totally can apply to guys too- I'm a gal-gal with good guy friends but I know you guy-gals are out there too. Gal-gal means that I live in woman-land. Most of my solid lifer friends are women;I excel at single-sex education; I am beyond comfortable in women-dominated professional and social activities. I *need* gal pals. Particularly in the face of This Man's Army and the men-everywhere phenomenon in this Army town. Seriously, this undisclosed location has a shocking predominance of (tall) dudes. Potentially coincidentally most of the local guys here seem to really work hard to be physically attractive. I can only speculate that there is a perception of competition when one is faced daily with what regular PT does to the average 18-24 year old male body. 

My first friend-crush didn't work out. She was cool, a professional connection that didn't balk when I called my male fiance my "partner", but alas she lived too far away to stay in touch. As luck would have it a random MeetUp.com group turned up my first progressive Army-wifey friend- we bonded over shared activism- and she was the also the first person since I moved here to mention the LGBT community in passing conversation. It's a small world after all because my second Army-wifey friend is a north-easterner with family-friend connections who was my penpal before she moved here and we met in person. Bonus- she has excellent taste in bourbon. Now we all three of us write a blog together, and make cocktails together, and bitch about this ungodly awful right of passage (aka wedding planning) that we are also coincidentally embarking upon together...

And I'm happy. Philia- Ancient Greek φιλία, meaning friendship- reigns supreme.

photo credit SweetPerversion Etsy shop